Mommy's Best Games, Inc. is an independent game developer founded in 2007. This is a view behind the scenes of our game development and marketing!

Nathan

Friday, October 31, 2008

Contest Results and Launch Party

Hello, Amy here. As the marketing and business side of Mommy’s Best Games, I decided to write this week's entry. Plus, as we shoot for the November 19th launch of Community Games, Nathan has his hands and head full of many other important tasks. As you have read in prior devlog entries, we entered Weapon of Choice into Microsoft’s XNA Dream Build Play 2008 international competition. We were very excited to learn that we earned THIRD PLACE!!!! We are the top American team. Check out the other winners; they all look great and are fun. It is definitely worth your time to check out.

We were also invited by Microsoft’s XNA Team to attend the Xbox LIVE Community Games and XNA Game Studio 3.0 Launch Event in San Francisco on October 29th. What an event! Also in attendance were the Word Soup and Colosseum teams. The room was set up with more than 15 high-def flat screen TVs with ready-to-play Dream Build Play and other XNA games. The press came, and we were ready. Although it was tough in one week to pull off schwag, we rocked it! Through Ebay, I ordered 50 1GB flash drives to create digital press kits. Although we would have desired to have our logo imprinted, it would have taken too long to print, ship and save data before the event. Instead, I created a sticker that had the WoC logo and Mommy’s Best website. The digital press kit included a welcome letter, two game trailers, three tracks of original music composed for WoC, screenshots and concept art, Mommy’s Best and WoC logos, unique gameplay features document, pertinent websites, and a partridge in a pear tree. We also ordered flexible flyers with the WoC title screen imprinted on it, in black, which were tossed around the party by the end of the night. Again, the lesson learned was, 4-color imprint is what is desired; it is expensive, especially when you have a rush order on it. We also provided the community and press with our promotional game cards, game card magnets, and business cards. The trick to getting all of this together so fast really relied upon 3 day shipping straight to the hotel instead of trying to get it here first, then take it with us to the hotel.
Nathan and I were very excited to talk with journalists from Gamasutra, MTV, WIRED, Gamespot, IGN, Joystiq, and Destructoid. Heck- we even have a piece in the New York Times. The press we have already received has been phenomenal.

However, we will still not abandon our original marketing plan: 1) get on as many blogs and websites as possible, 2) get friends and fans to deliver game cards to local game stores, college bulletin boards and any place that gamers frequent. Although, Microsoft's hospitality sure did help boost Weapon of Choice's marketing plan.

So, as high as we feel, onward we go, to finish Mommy's Best Weapon of Choice by November 19th.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, you had your own swag! Great job guys. I started seeing WOC pop up all over the news yesterday, so I was really excited to hear how everything went. Sounds like entering the DreamBuildPlay contest was a really good idea.

Keep rocking. Almost there.

Anonymous said...

You guys rock! Congrats! We are so proud of you. All the hard work is paying off! di and nu

Anonymous said...

Congratulations! But, I always knew you rocked... Love the November 19th goal date and hope it all goes exactically as imagined. The white rabbit believes in you!

Anonymous said...

Congratulations, Amy & Nathan, this is awesome and I really enjoyed reading the NY Times article. I bragged about you all to my husband and friends. - Njideka, Youth for Technology Foundation.